Check out the 'Making a Vault Hunter' Beyond the Borderlands #1 for Borderlands 4, an upcoming installment in the first-person open-world looter shooter developed by Gearbox. Hear straight from the developers at Gearbox Software on the process of making their very own Vault Hunter, the playable characters of the Borderlands franchise.
00:16Wallhunters at their core are like treasure hunters, bounty seekers.
00:20They kind of live on the edge.
00:22They're fine taking matters into their own hands,
00:24kind of playing that gray space between what's right and what's wrong.
00:28Ultimately, they're after a buck or, you know, riches, power, glory, you name it.
00:32And they're willing to do what they want to get to it.
00:36So a vault hunter then is a treasure seeker,
00:39but also a vault hunter is someone that embraces the chaos that is the Borderlands and thrives.
00:50It starts with pitches from within the company.
00:53Anyone in the company can pitch a vault hunter.
00:56We play the game so much that we start to think about what we would want to see in it next.
01:01We collect pitches at the company level.
01:04We review those pitches and narrow it down.
01:07Often we'll take elements of multiple pitches and put them together to make something even more badass.
01:14And then it really goes to design.
01:16We want them to be somebody that players and ourselves can relate to.
01:20We feel very similar to like a hero.
01:22Like in a comic book, it's frequently a good reference point for us.
01:25You want to get something that feels familiar and play as somebody you actually want it to be in real life.
01:30You know, it starts with the ideation of trying to, you know, define and decipher what kind of fantasies we want to build for players.
01:37And then from there it goes into concept.
01:39Concept comes up with a bunch of ideas that then design reacts to.
01:43And so from there you go on to building the character and then actually building the action skill.
01:48And that's a continuous process as you work with animation, effects, audio, seeing if it feels good, if it feels fun.
01:56Sometimes it doesn't.
01:57You go back and you have to redo stuff.
01:58So, you know, Vault Hunters are in constant production over the course of the project.
02:03And we will keep tweaking stuff until, you know, code tells us stop touching stuff.
02:08We got to ship.
02:09Yeah, I mean, I think the guiding principle of Borderlands in general is just to be badass.
02:13The abilities, the gear, everything, it all has to be the things that our community expects.
02:18They can be from any walk of life.
02:20They can bring anything to the table.
02:22But ultimately they have to be cool and they have to be fun to play.
02:26We just approach each character and imagine who they are at their most heightened,
02:31in the most insane scenario you could play someone and have them, because they are in the Borderlands, assume it to be the norm.
02:41The average day in the Borderlands would be an insane day for any of us.
02:46And what would a crazy day look like for someone that lives in this universe?
02:53We're always looking for creating new and interesting experiences.
02:56We almost always have a soldier and we almost always have a siren.
03:00But we're always looking for what if the siren had spooky dark powers?
03:04What if a soldier had a suit that was grafted to his body and he had extra arms and ligaments to help him in battle?
03:14To the team, delivering Vault Hunters that we know players will really love is everything.
03:18We want to make sure that we're playtesting, that we're bringing in players that can hit on each of the individual phases that we have through development.
03:26For me, that was one of my pillars to the team on this project was playtest often.
03:32Any of these number of things that we have with systems and design, we want to get those in front of players so that they can tell us if we're on base or if we need to go and be a little bit better.
03:41We're always looking at the community when it comes to our Vault Hunters to make sure that we're kind of meeting their expectations and then exceeding them and also surprising them.
03:49You know, we can kind of infer a lot of what they're feeling and we can like use that to our advantage to try to play with those expectations.
03:56And so when the game comes out, they're still surprised in the wake of all the marketing that comes along with it.
04:02Yeah, I'm so excited for the people to be able to actually get their hands on Borderlands 4 and just see how badass this world really is.
04:13I mean, it's not only bigger and I mean bigger by a large extent than any Borderlands we've made, but it's also far more detailed and far more beautiful.
04:22We're back and we're bigger and better than ever.
04:24We have so much more abilities, so much more that goes into our Vault Hunters.
04:29We have billions of guns. I think that people will be really really excited about where we're headed in Borderlands 4.
